Social Media and Cataloging

In your opinion, what's enduring about the introduction of social media such as tagging?
Well, to me the important contribution that social media and tagging has for us as catalogers is that we are seeing the democratization of metadata, and more broadly data as a whole. Of course, metadata is a new term, but to this point there has been little interest (and practically no methods to do it) in the “crowd-sourcing” of metadata. It’s really within the past five years that methods have been implemented to allow practically anyone to generate metadata about really any object. Librarians should be thrilled with this for two reasons:
First, we don’t have to do quite as much of the heavy lifting of metadata generation - others are doing it for us.
Second, as Tim Spalding points out, libraries have always been (for the most part) about the democratization and spread of information, and the democratization of metadata is simply the next, logical step in the spread of information.
And following on this, how do we decide which aspects deserve investment of time and money?
I think the first logical step in this new phase of information is that libraries should open up their catalogs, and by this I mean OCLC as well. Why do we have to so tightly control all this information? What an amazing resource for “mashups,” for example. Tim Berners-Lee talked about this recently in his talk at TED in 2010:













http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html








To be fair, library metadata might not be as useful as bike accidents, but I am sure people in the wider world will find uses for the metadata we in the library community have never thought of.
We truly need to find some way to integrate social tagging of “aboutness” and the juggernaut of LCSH. LCSH is so slow to change and grow that some form of integration between social tagging and a controlled vocabulary needs to be found. As a matter of fact, the amount of information in the world (as I read yesterday) is growing at such a fast rate that search engine bots and crawlers can’t even keep up - so how can LC be expected to keep up? Social sourcing is one way to help libraries and their information resources adapt to this world. I would say then that perhaps LC is not the best organization to head LCSH if this integration occurs. Imagine all the linked words and knowledge web type stuff if we could meld the two (semantic web?). And what should happen to all of this? It should be free to all, online. Of course, this precludes some form of organization and funding, which our profession is uniquely equipped to do - we advocate, we organize, and we connect people with information. This brings me to a bit of a soapbox that many librarians have trouble with (or so it seems to me) it is our job to share information (in any form) not hoard it, and through this we will stay relevant in the information age.
How do we evaluate the effects and utility?
I think we look at data usage - specifically, how is the data we create and share used by the larger world? Perhaps licensing the stuff we share through a Creative Commons license that requires attribution will help us to track usage while not abrogating the “fetter-free” access to the data we share.
Of course, you can also look at the raw data - hit-counts, page views, and such. But, as we all know this doesn’t really show user impact, and nor is it reflective of the broader purpose of libraries. To me this ties in with Dr. Lankes’ concept of Participatory Librarianship - using libraries to help people “make stuff.” To make the impact user centered, you have to look at the outcome, or the end product of the work enabled by libraries, or librarians.
Thinking about the various components of cataloging and catalog records individually, where is there the most promise for integration of social media: description, classification, subject headings, linking of works, expressions, manifestations and items?
Subject headings, as I mentioned before, are seemingly full of promise for integration with social media. I feel sure you read enough about this above, so I won’t say any more about it here.
Linking of works - The next major push online is the development of a semantic web of knowledge, where many things are linked to each other online, improving (in a way) collocation and classification of information on the internet. This also helps people to better understand terms and ideas, as they are presented in some sort of context, as opposed to the stand-alone model we see in the internet today. Of course, this can flow freely into our catalogs, but it can go other places as well from the catalog - IMDB, Dictionaries, Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, and many others.

Ok, that’s plenty - sorry I wrote so much! I am curious to know what you all think!